A while ago we participated in service day, and I stayed at school to participate in the domestic helper group. It was a bit boring, and I was slightly disappointed because on the description it said we would be doing simulations but all we did was a online word game. Nevertheless, I learned a lot from the activities, especially the online word game.

We saw the story from the helper’s point of view, and the thing that I noticed was that they never really had a choice. No matter what I chose, I still had to come to Hong Kong, still got a bad job and was mistreated. When I tried to report my case, it was impossible to get a good result no matter what I did. This makes me sad because in real life in Hong Kong many helpers face the same problems and they can only get into worse and worse situations.

After the word game, we played a modified version of Game of Life, a popular board game. In first round, I played the role of employer, and I noticed how disadvantaged helpers were. All the employers (that went to ‘college’ in the game) were paid in amounts of 80K and up, while even the domestic helpers that went to ‘college’ only received amounts of 4 or 5 thousand. Overall, these two games showed me how disadvantaged they were and how little choice they had. Furthermore, many helpers in Hong Kong have no idea what their rights are, how much they should be paid, and what facilities they should have. Too scared of losing their jobs, many are afraid to speak out and contact help in cases of abuse, overwork, and underpayment.

The song I chose for my recording was “Rocky Mountain”. It is 2/4 time, and the key of tune is C major. The first and second lines were fairly easy to play and were mainly made up of Eighth notes, with a quarter note and a rest at the end. I found the third and fourth lines harder, and in the beginning I frequently mixed up the Quarter and Eighth notes. I played a chord for every beat, which meant I played a chord for every two Eighth notes and a chord for every Quarter note. The chords I played were C, F, and G. I had some trouble with consistently playing notes accurately, especially with bars 1-8 where the rhythm is quite fast, because when I did plucking my fingers would sometime hit the other strings and I couldn’t change fingering fast enough.

Discuss your overall understanding of Garageband and its processes. How has your skill at Garageband impacted your song?

Before this project, I had never used GarageBand before, but I spent some time on it and learned how to cut the tracks and align them in time. This helped me a lot because I had trouble playing in time. I couldn’t change my fingering fast enough, and my notes often came out sounding weak or messy. Because of this, I decided to do the plucking bar by bar, with some harder notes (such as G and F) recorded individually. Using GarageBand, I fit the clips together and aligned it to time. I had to trim some of the clips where I played just one note because the vibration and the sound continued on after the note had passed. When I recorded chords, I found it hard to consistently play the chords well and switch between chords quickly, so I recorded each chord separately, duplicated it, and fit them together. When recording, I found that using earphones and listening to the metronome helped my time it properly, with a steady tempo of 80, without having the clicking sound recorded. Using earphones also helped me in that I could listen to my other tracks while recording my singing. Overall, I think Garage Band helped me a lot with my recording and by cutting clips, separated recordings, and trimming, I fixed a lot of mistakes that would have thrown of the timing and rhythm of my piece.

About a week ago I posted my logo, asking for feedback. As a recap, this is my logo.

After gathering feedback, I created a short paragraph summarizing what I think I did well and what I could improve on.

I created a successful logo because I used alignment and proximity very well, between the star and the S. The star was particularly successful as it fitted perfectly into the curve of my S and also made the logo look more complete. The logo also represented me quite well, as the S shape stands for Stephanie. It’s an organic, memorable logo that is also timeless.I think some improvements I can make on my logo is the color scheme (many people said the color blue didn’t really represent me.) I could have used a brighter color, as that would better represent my personality. The gradient was also too soft for my personality, and I could use a brighter gradient next time.

I can use my knowledge of English to learn French because there are many similarities between the words in the two languages, allowing me to make an educated guess at many words. The two languages also use the same alphabet (the Roman alphabet), which makes learning French much easier than learning languages such as Chinese. Finally, there are words that are almost exactly the same in both English and French, such as téléphone,

b) How do I introduce myself in French?

I can introduce myself in French by talking about the following:

My favourite colours and least favourite colours.

My pets

Where I live

What nationality I am

The languages I speak

I can also help the progression of the conversation by using phrases such as Moi aussi and Et toi,

Conceptual

How are languages linked to one another?

In my opinion, languages are linked through alphabets, and many come from the same base families, such as greek and latin. Countries may influence each other’s languages, and occupation on a country can affect it’s language. For example, when the Spanish occupied Vietnam, they could not write the native character-based language, who they wrote it phonetically, using the Roman alphabet. This stuck, and later it was made standard, so now the Vietnamese alphabet is based on Roman numerals.

Debatable

Does learning a new language make my mother tongue stronger?

I don’t think learning French has improved my mother tongue, because they come from different base families, and have different sentence structures. For example, in Chinese, you would say 一 (yi(one))隻(zhi)狗(gou(dog)), but in French you would just say Un chien. There is no word similar to ‘zhi’ in Chinese, as in Chinese people, animals, and object all have a certain word in front. I believe another main problem is that the two languages come don’t use the same system. French, along with most european countries, uses the Roman alphabet, while Chinese used characters. Because these two systems have no connections, I can’t ‘spell’ out the words as I would between French and English. Along with the problem of different sentence structures, I don’t think that learning French could make my mother tongue stronger.

Last class we were given a challenge to design a cup with only two sheets of A4 paper. No tape. No glue. Nothing except two sheets of paper. Some people immediately started to google how to make a paper cup. I decided I would model my cup on something that was cup-like in shape. I found Niki’s pencil case. It was a cute corgi one, but more importantly, it was cylindrical in shape.

After borrowing the pencil case, I began shaping my first piece of paper around the case, figuring that since it needed to be a cup, working with a cup-shaped object couldn’t be wrong. I was proved right. After a little bit of fiddling, I managed to make a cup by shaping it around the pencil case and then folding in the flaps. This completed, I repeated this procedure with another piece of paper folded double thick. I put this in the bottom of the cup, hoping it would make the cup sturdier and help it to hold water longer. An important detail about my first prototype was that I made sure that the little mini cup and the big cup were facing different directions. Because I did this, the strong points (the sides) and the weak points (the corners, because water could leak), balanced each other out.

Having completed my first prototype, I went and filled it with water, just a small amount, filling the bottom of the cup and no more. Then, I put it on my table and began waiting for it to leak. I expected it to leak any moment, but it actually held water for quite a long time. But, when I added more water in the same prototype, it flooded the little mini cup in the bottom and my cup began to leak quite quickly.

I knew I already had a good cup, but I was still unsatisfied. As I still had plenty of time, I decided to build a second prototype. I used the same design, but this time I folded both papers double thick and placed them together, making a very small but super thick-walled cup. As soon as I put water in it though, I realised a major design fail I had overlooked. I did not make both cups separately, then stack them together. The problem of this was that the folded paper was so thick that the corners of the cup had huge holes in them that leaked water almost immediately after it was put in.

So, overall, my first prototype was better than my second one and I think I really should’ve looked at my first prototype and tried to improve it, instead of throwing away something that worked and doing something totally different. Oh well. At least I have a nice cup.

It’s the start of a new school year, and I’m rediscovering my blog (because it was forgotten in the summer)! The first thing I noticed about G7 was how different it was from G6. We have to move from class to class, tackle 9 sets of homework and assignments, 9 teachers, and nine sets of expectations. Plus, there was also the (very) flawed and problematic uniform. (What do you mean the skorts only come in september?) Anyways, I’m looking forward to an awesome year and (way) more posts than G6.